11th Jan - Feminists or Meninists?

I slept like a baby last night. Although, I'm not sure why that's a common simile... In my own experience, I've found babies to sleep terribly. Constantly screaming, crapping their nappies, sucking some nips, they basically do everything they can to avoid the act of sleep itself. I guess my slumber was enhanced by my chaotic return to 7-a-side. Fuelled on by my pre-match meal of Quorn chilli con carne, I was starting to believe those Mo Farah adverts when I found myself in highly energetic mood during the first-half of the game. Although I was satisfied with my own personal performance, I certainly can't lay any boastful claim that it amounted to anything... We slumped to a 5-1 defeat. Although I must insist that the scoreline didn't necessarily reflect the match fairly and to use a common footballing phrase, we'll come back stronger. 

Elsewhere today, I'm excitedly making plans for a 'meeting' (*cough, piss-up*), with two of my closest friends, this coming Friday. To most, hanging out with pals is a regular occurrence, but due to the geographical scattering of my mob, it's certainly tougher to organise frequent rendezvous. Liverpool, Sheffield, Guildford, London, Cardiff, and in the case of one of the lads I'll be seeing come Freitag, even Qatar. It's certainly not ideal having chums spaced so far apart, but it certainly adds to the excitement factor on the once/twice per year occasion that you all manage to get together and find yourself in one common location. 

After embracing the feminine trend of the 'bottomless brunch' post-lockdown, I'm now trying to convert the chaps into my own world of open-mindedness, and although the initial sales pitch proved tricky (one of our neanderthals refuses to even try cocktails or spirits, and insists on a diet of lager and lager-alone), I've managed to find a common ground... Bottomless pizza and beer. If ever you were looking for a gap in the market, this is it! 'Male bottomless brunches'... There's your USP, and whilst we're working at bridging the equality on brunches, perhaps we can do something about all alarmingly low male custody rates, or alarmingly high suicide stats, too? You see, if being a feminist is all about striving for equal rights for females, then being a 'meninist' is about fighting the same causes on the fella's front. But on both sides, we see far too much polarisation, which then evolves into some kind of tribal war between the sexes. 

The stats you see above are completely true, yet are largely ignored by the majority of mainstream media outlets. The problem we have now, is that by fighting for women's rights, a huge proportion of ladies are using this as an opportunity, not to empower women, but to categorise, stereotype, and shame, the entire gender of men. The amount of times I see toxic tweets - particularly after a high-profile rape/murder case - where bitter keyboard warriors post phrases like 'typical men', is not at all healthy for our society. Do women feel safe when they walk home at night in the dark? No. Is that down to the behaviour of men? No. Is that down to the behaviour of some sick and twisted psychopaths who do not represent the rest of us? Absolutely. Both genders have issues, and percentages (like the image above) which we need to work together to decrease. So let's do away with these 'feminist' and 'meninist' tags, and start labelling ourselves as'equalitists', because surely that's the same thing we're all striving for? As Martin Luther King once said... 

"I have a dream. That one day, women will attend the bottomless beer and pizza brunch, and men will pose for Instagram boomerangs with a table full of prosecco."